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Understanding Moore’s Law

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Every now and then, I read something in the press that really gets me going. Recently, it was this piece in the Red Herring, titled "Forget Moore's Law." The author's sensationalistic thesis was that the current shift from the "bigger, faster, hotter" do-everything-on-one-chip computing paradigm to a more distributed "smaller, cheaper, cooler" networked computing paradigm somehow represents a denunciation of Moore's Law on the part of the computing industry. This is, of course, complete bunk. Unfortunately, it's an increasingly common flavor of bunk that's being propagated in the press in light of some very real trends in computing. (To the Red Herring author's credit, the trends he points out are real. It's his mangling of Moore's Law that I object to.)

I had originally set myself the task of writing a brief introduction to Moore's Law, in order to explain the fact that "smaller, cheaper, cooler" is just as much a product of the shrinking transistor sizes that Moore predicted as is the massive and monolithic Itanium2. As my articles often tend to do, this one expanded into lengthy, three-part investigation and explanation of Moore's original paper and the way that the trends Moore identified have played out in actual practice over the past three decades.

This graph does indeed show transistor densities doubling every 12 months, so the formulation above is accurate. However, it doesn't quite do justice to the full scope of the picture that Moore painted in his brief, uncannily prescient paper. This is because Moore's paper dealt with more than just shrinking transistor sizes. Moore was ultimately interested in shrinking transistor costs, and in the effects that cheap, ubiquitous computing power would have on the way we live and work. This section of the present article aims to give you a general understanding of the various trends and factors that Moore wove together to predict the rise of the personal computer, the mobile phone, the digital wristwatch, and other innovations that we now take for granted. Of course, I should note that Moore's original paper was only four pages in length, while the present article is much longer. This is because Moore presumed quite a bit more background knowledge about the semiconductor industry than most non-specialists have. Thus this article aims to give you enough background to understand Moore's reasoning.

The topic is incredibly huge, and in six pages I got nowhere near even scratching the surface. Those of you who're up on semiconductor fabrication will undoubtedly be able to point out numerous points that I probalby should've included in the article but didn't. So this article doesn't pretend to be anything more than a very general overview/introduction to a topic that could easily occupy an entire book.